Psalm 82

Psalm 82 is often cited in defense of the idea that the Bible teaches a kind of henotheism (there’s more than one God, but there’s only one that we should be concerned with), or polytheism (there’s more than one God, and we should be concerned with them all). For example, it has been quoted in defense of the Mormon doctrine of Eternal Progression, which holds that our present Heavenly Father had a Father before Him, who had a Father before Him and so on, and that all these beings (including us, if we subscribe) are progressing eternally in ever increasing states of knowledge and glory.

What I hope to demonstrate is that if that’s your view, then Psalm 82 is not your friend. The reason is because of the relationships between the “Gods” that it describes.

There are three things we need to comprehend in this Psalm, and all of them are interesting in their own right;

• The use of the Hebrew word “Elohim”, which can be properly translated as “God”, “Gods”, or “gods”

• The duties and responsibilities of these “Gods”, and how they were failing in them

• To whom these “Gods” were answerable, and who has the prerogative of judging them

Here’s the Psalm in its entirety, according to Professor Robert Alter in his "The Book of Psalms, a Translation with Commentary":

An Asaph psalm
1 God takes His stand in the divine assembly
in the midst of the gods he renders judgment
2 “How long will you judge dishonestly,
and show favor to the wicked?

Selah

3 Do justice to the poor and the orphan.
Vindicate the lowly and the wretched
4 Free the poor and the needy ,
from the hand of the wicked save them
5 They do not know and do not grasp,
in darkness they walk about.
All the earth’s foundation totter
6 As for me, I had thought: you were gods
and the sons of the Most High were you all.
7 Yet indeed like humans you shall die
and like one of the princes, fall”
8 Arise, O God, judge the earth
for You hold in estate all nations

A couple of footnotes for the curious;

• Like the Professor and all modern renderings, I have retained the verse numbers for ease of reference, but they do not appear in the oldest texts

• The opening phrase “An Asaph Psalm” attributes the Psalm to Asaph, who might have been the father of King Hezekiah’s secretary, or a son of Berechiah, chief Levite musician under David.

• Nobody knows what the word “Selah” means, but the consensus is that it is likely a musical or poetic note. I like to think it probably means something like “pause here”, or “play a few bars of music here” like “bridge”, as in “verse, chorus, bridge, chorus”.


Firstly, let’s tackle the use of the Biblical Hebrew word “Elohim” which occurs twice in Verse 1 (see http://net.bible.org/#!bible/Psalms+82 and open the tab “Grk/Heb” to see the English and Hebrew side by side). Like most modern translations, the Professor’s translation renders it as “God” and “gods” so, how many “Gods” are there?

Nobody disputes that the first “Elohim” refers to the God. In the Biblical idiom, nobody else would have the right to “stand” in judgment in the assembly of someone else. It’s the same word for God that’s used in Genesis 1:1 and it’s actually plural in form because it bears the “im” plural suffix of all male Hebrew nouns. But, when referring to the God, it should considered to refer to a singular “God”, not “Gods” for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the “Spirit of God” in Genesis 1:2 is singular. If there were “Gods” involved in the Creation, then Genesis 1:2 should have “spirits of the Gods”, but the Hebrew word for “spirit” is firmly singular, not plural (it does not bear the “ot” plural suffix of all female Hebrew nouns and the Hebrew for “spirit” is a female noun).

Some commentators and translators understand the second word “Elohim” to refer to human judges, kings or leaders, but I’m not convinced because it doesn’t fit with the story that unfolds in the Psalm. The least forced reading is that the Psalm refers to “real” deities, not mortals, because the worst that happens to them is that they are condemned to mortality (Verse 7). That is hardly a fitting judgment if they were mortal to start with. The scenario in Verse 1, then, is that the God turns up in the “assembly” of the “lesser” gods, rather like He is walking in to Mount Olympus.

This, I believe, is not out of line with other Biblical texts; I find it quite natural to place these “lesser” gods within the context of the creation of “all things” in John 1:3 and Colossians 1:16. The Bible, in my opinion, does not dispute the existence of these “lesser” heavenly beings, but it does profoundly challenge their status and their relevance to us.

This brings us to what those “lesser” gods should have been doing, and why the God judges them. As the Psalmist notes in Verses 3 and 4, the "lesser" gods should have been upholding justice. However, they were derelict in their duties, and the God holds them to account. Perhaps they were too busy enjoying the latest chocolate confection or beer, as some recent TV ads would have us believe.

There’s a very important aspect to this in Verse 5, which Professor Alter remarks upon as follows;

All the earth’s foundations totter: This is not, as may first appear, a non sequitur. The order of creation itself, in the view of Biblical monotheism, is founded on justice. When the lesser gods allow injustice to become rampant, the very foundations of the earth are shaken – the perversion of justice is the first step towards the apocalypse.

I find the Professor’s comments startling in our modern context. The Biblical authors considered human justice to be an extension, or even an expression, of the natural justice upon which the universe is founded. For them, the breaking of the law on a human scale was not merely a question of personal preference, but something that had significant cosmological implications. If a wrong was committed, it was not merely an offense against the victim, but something that shifted earth and heaven, rather like the way that a tremor or earthquake is the extension or expression of plate tectonics. Of course, the corollary is true; that the enactment of human justice restores the cosmological order of things. As a side note, I believe that this is a proper approach to the work of Christ as described by Paul in Colossians 1:19-20.

So, when the God turns up in the assembly of the lesser Gods, He does not like what He sees, and he pronounces judgment on them. No longer are they given the privileges of deity, they are effectively cast down into the human realm, where they will die like humans (Verse 7). They might have it good for a while, like the eponymous prince of the Psalm, but their days are numbered. Empirically, we know this to be true, because who today worships Zeus, or Apollo, or Baal, or Ashteroth, or any of these pagan tribal deities? They starved to death when their followers stopped feeding them with their sacrifices. For all intents and purposes, they have “died”.

Finally, then, one has to wonder at the “uber-ness” of the God in judging these “lesser” gods. This is not a case for either henotheism or polytheism, but rather a case against them both in no uncertain terms. There is only One God who has the right and the authority to judge these lesser gods. He calls them to account, and they are subject to Him. The implication in the Psalm is why bother with the monkey when you should be dealing with the organ-grinder.

The fact that the God judges and outlives the “other” Gods should be enough to dismiss this Psalm as supporting the Mormon doctrine of Eternal Progression. It must be noted that the direction of travel for these other heavenly beings is not upwards, as Eternal Progression proposes, but downwards. These “Elohim” are not headed to eternal life, but to mortal death because of their manifest failures and injustices. They are subject to the judgment of the “Elohim”, which would be a reversal the Biblical idiom, because, if Eternal Progression were true, the son would be judging his fathers.

In conclusion, I believe Psalm 82 has a message that is highly relevant in today’s pluralistic culture. Whatever “gods” are worshipped today, they are subject to judgment by the God, who guarantees that justice will prevail.

The Psalm also speaks of a perspective that is foreign to us in our modern context; that the upholding of human justice has cosmological implications. Today, we tend to view morality as a question of personal choice, or preference. In the Psalmist's view, the failure of the "gods" in upholding justice threatened the very fabric of the universe, and only the intervention of the God could save the world from oblivion.

God and the Japan Tsunami

I was horrified to hear the news of a Tsunami that had hit the east coast of Japan at Sendi. As of today, the estimated toll is about 12,000 confirmed dead and 17,000 missing.

I had been meaning to blog this issue since the tsunami hit on 11 March 2011, but it’s something that I approach with a great deal of fear and trembling. No matter what I think, or whatever “explanation” I might postulate, the fact remains that some 29,000 people have lost their lives. It’s a monumental tragedy, and I will not allow myself to treat it in any other way. Each one of those people who died was a valuable, meaningful person, not just some shock statistic on a banner headline. I imagine that in that population were men and women, young and old, saints and sinners.

This is a time for grieving, not explanation.

Yet, it is human nature to search for meaning in what goes on around us. To various degrees, everyone who is affected, or who can see this event will turn from grieving to explanation. That search for an explanation will include some impassioned questions; did they deserve to die?

I have to say that I been immensely impressed by the response of the Japanese people, as seen on the TV coverage. There are the images of the ordinary women, searching the wreckage of their homes for their lost families and neighbors with a public dignity that seems impossible to maintain. There’s the story of the chief fireman, who lost his entire crew as they battled, unsuccessfully, to close the flood gate. There’s the manager of the nuclear plant, who visited the refugees one by one to apologize to them personally for his plant’s contamination of their food and their homes.

The word that the press has used is “stoic”. It might be an appropriate word, but its possibly incongruous because its Greek and has more to do with the heritage of Europe than the Far East. It seems to have been exported from west to east. Is there a better Japanese word, that we can import into our language? I ask because I’m wary of imposing Western interpretations on how an Asian people are reacting to this.

Another imposition on the Japanese understanding of this event might also be the prevailing Western idea of God. I’m unsure if the Shinto and Buddhist people of Japan might frame the question in this way, but I know the small Christian community might; did God send the Tsunami?

If He did, what was His purpose in it?

If He didn’t, does He interact with our world at all?

There seems to be much less public interest in these questions than the debate that followed the Boxing Day Tsunami in December 2004. Maybe its because the casualty count is much lower. Maybe its because the predominantly Muslim people affected in 2004 would have been more inclined to process their reaction by questioning God.

I have not done any sustained research on the matter, but I only came across one article that attempted to answer these questions from a Theist perspective. It’s a podcast from the website PleaseConvinceMe.Com, run by Jim Wallis and his team of “one dollar apologists”. Even so, this was not an extended reflection on this one event, but rather Jim Wallis giving his initial reactions.

I listened to the podcast and, whereas I don’t disagree with anything Jim Wallis has to say on the specifics, one thing that struck me about his approach was that he seemed to be interpreting the tsunami, and all of life’s triumphs and tribulations, in terms of what benefits us. His conclusion seemed to be that God sent the tsunami because it would ultimately benefit us, including those who died.

If I were an atheist, I would easily dismiss this position as absurd. How can something possibly benefit you if you end up dead? Jim Wallis counters (and I paraphrase) by saying that our lives go beyond death, so even our journey through death has relevance to what happens to us thereafter.

I’m not entirely satisfied with Jim Wallis’ position here. Psalm 6:5 says, “Among the dead no one proclaims your name. Who praises you from the grave?” The salvation that the Psalmist sings about is all about preserving this present life.

As for the atheist position, I would have to respond that the lives of those who died had no meaning at all because, to put it bluntly; who cares? I might care, and you might care, but when our days are over, and we have long since been forgotten, what possible meaning remains?

Maybe its because I have an austere soul that I tend to believe that I’m really insignificant in the grand scheme of things. I find it hard to believe that God would summon a tsunami for my sake.

However, Jim Wallis does make a point that I need to hear. The Christian Gospel states that, though it’s not about me, God is interested in my welfare. Romans 8:28 tells me that “…we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” By “all things”, I presume Paul includes tsunamis. God loves me, and He can order things for my benefit. Even so, I wonder what “benefit” God intended to those who died in the recent tsunami. I don’t have a satisfactory explanation.

Another part of my brain has been occupied with cosmology. In particular the Incarnation of the Word of God (as you might see in the song I wrote last week). The issue here is how God reveals Himself through his creation, of which I am but a miniscule part. I’ll conclude with a comment that I posted on FaceBook;

If we are looking for God in this tsunami, we should not look to the tsunami itself but to the lives of the people who were affected, and who are reacting to it. Why? Because God has chosen to create His image in people, not tsunamis.

God questions from a 6 year old

This week, a colleague of mine sent me an email. She explained that her 6 year old son had been asking her questions about God, and could I help answer them. I wrote back as soon as I could with the following response.

(NB I have edited it lightly, by gathering my footnotes in the "footer")

Who is God and how was he born?

I’ll try to relate this in language that a 6 year old can understand, but I’ve put in some “adult” notes to try to help you make sense of it, too.

I’ll stick to the Bible on this, but I think it is fair to say that different people and different religions have very different views, and they are not all the same. Not everybody is going to agree on this (1).

God is bigger, and stranger, than any of us can possibly imagine. If you can imagine how big the universe is, then you also need to imagine that the universe exists within God to get an idea of just how big He is. That means that we will never fully understand everything there is to know about Him. However, we can know Him. You might not be able to understand everything about your Mum and Dad, but you know them because you talk to them, you know what they like and what they don’t like and in many ways you are just like them (2).

So, God created the universe, the world and you and me. We live in the world that God has created. God was there before the universe started, He is there now, and He will be there after it has finished. God wasn’t born and He will not die. He was always God and He always will be. This is one thing that’s very different between God and us (3).

One day, God decided that he wanted us to see Him as He truly is. He knew that we could look at all the stars and read all the books and ask everybody who knew something about Him, but it would never be like actually meeting Him. So, He came into our world. He came as a baby that grew into a man – Jesus Christ, who was born on Christmas Day, died on Good Friday and rose again on Easter Sunday. Finally, we could see for ourselves what He is like (4).

If I were God, and I were to come into the world that I made and ruled over, I think I would make myself King. I think I would set myself up in the most expensive palace, and I’d get my servants to run around after me, doing all the chores, doing all the boring stuff, and looking after my interests.

When the real God came into our world, He did things differently. Instead of getting us to serve Him, He served us. Instead of grabbing all the toys for Himself, He gave everything away. Instead of setting Himself up in a Royal Palace, He made Himself homeless. Instead of setting things up so that He could live forever, He died on a cross so that we could live. The story doesn’t end there, though. The Bible tells us He was raised to life, and He lives today.

So, when you ask me “who is God”, the face that comes to my mind is the face of Jesus. When you ask me “what is he like”, the story that comes to my mind is the story of Jesus.

There’s a poem in the Bible that was written shortly after Jesus had come to our world. It tells us how we should react to this story:

Think of yourselves the way Christ Jesus thought of himself.
He had equal status with God but didn't think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what.
Not at all.
When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human!
Having become human, he stayed human.
It was an incredibly humbling process.
He didn't claim special privileges.
Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life and then died a selfless, obedient death—and the worst kind of death at that—a crucifixion.
Because of that obedience, God lifted him high and honored him far beyond anyone or anything, ever, so that all created beings in heaven and on earth—even those long ago dead and buried—will bow in worship before this Jesus Christ, and call out in praise that he is the Master of all, to the glorious honor of God the Father.

Philippians 2:5-11. This version from “The Message”. See also the NIV translation for a more “formal” rendering.

Notes:
1 Some people have tried to reconcile the world’s religions through syncretism. IMO, syncretism doesn’t work, and we just have to come to terms with the fact that the religions cannot be reconciled theologically
2 Much of this stems from the opening chapter of the Bible in Genesis 1, particularly Genesis 1:27. Also, there is a difference between understanding and knowing, and anyone who claims to fully understand God has plainly lost the plot.
3 Much of this stems from the title “Alpha and Omega” that is applied to God in Revelation 1:8, and a slew of other verses that I regularly refer to when I contend with people who insist that God was created, or that he had his own heavenly father and mother, e.g. Mormonism.
4 This is what theologians call the Incarnation – the Word made flesh, as in John 1:14.

The Name of God

On more than a few occasions, when discussing the nature of God, translations and the like, I quote Professor Robert Alter’s commentary on the dialogue between Moses and God prior to his confrontation with Pharaoh (from The Five Books of Moses, A Translation with Commentary, Robert Alter, 2004, ISBN 0-393-01955-1). The story is told in Exodus 3, and when Moses asks of God, “what is his name?” (Exodus 3:13), God replies “I AM WHO I AM” (Exodus 3:14). Here’s what the Professor writes on Exodus 3:14;

‘Ehyeh-‘Asher-‘Ehyeh. God’s response perhaps gives Moses more than he bargained for – not just an identifying divine name (the implication of offering one such name might be that there are other divinities) but an ontological divine mystery of the most daunting character. Rivers of ink have since flowed in theological reflection on and philological analysis of this name. The following brief remarks will be confined to the latter consideration, which in any case must provide the grounding for the former. “I-Will-Be-Who-I-Will-Be” is the most plausible construction of the Hebrew, though the middle word ‘asher, could easily mean “what” rather than “who”, and the common rendering “I-Am-That-I-Am” cannot be excluded. (“Will” is used here rather than “shall” because the Hebrew sounds like an affirmation with emphasis, not just a declaration.) Since the tense system of biblical Hebrew by no means corresponds to that of modern English, it is also perfectly possible to construe this as “I Am He Who Endures.” The strong consensus of biblical scholarship is that the original pronunciation of the name YHWH that God goes on to use in verse 15 was “Yahweh.” There are several good arguments for that conclusion. There is an independent name for the deity, Yah, which also appears as a suffix to proper names, and that designation could very well be a shortened form of this name. Greek translations reflect a pronunciation close to “Yahweh.” In that form, the name would be the causative or hiph’il form of the verb “to be” and thus would have the theologically attractive sense of “He Who Brings Things Into Being.” All this is plausible, but it is worth registering at least a note of doubt about the form of the divine name. Here God instructs Moses to tell Israel ‘Ehyeh, “I-Will-Be,” has sent him. The deity, if the Masoretic vocalization is to be trusted, refers to himself not with a causative but with the qal (“simple”) conjugation. This could conceivably imply that others refer to him in the qal third person as Yihyeh, “He-Will-Be.” (The medial y sound in this conjugated form would have had considerable phonetic inter-change with the w consonant in YHWH.) This in turn would make the name fit a common pattern for male names in the third-person singular, qal conjugation, imperfect form: Yitshaq (Isaac), “he will laugh”; Ya’aqov (Jacob) “he will protect,” or “he will grab the heel”; Yiftah (Jephthah), “he will open”; and many others. If this were the case, then the name “Yah” could have been assimilated to “YHWH” by folk etymology and then perhaps even affected its pronunciation. Whether the pronunciation of this name later in the Hellenistic periods, by then restricted to the high priest on the Day of Atonement, Yahweh, as indicated in Greek transcriptions, reflects its original sound is at least open to question. The logic of Yihyeh as the essential divine name would be that whereas particular actions may be attributed to humans through the verbal names chosen for them, to God alone belongs the unlimited, unconditional being. This conjecture, inspired by the use here by God of the qal conjugation rather than the causative conjugation in naming himself, is far from certain, but it might introduce at least some margin of doubt about the consensus of opinion regarding the divine name.

Two thoughts have remained with me since first reading Professor Alter’s commentary. The first is that translation is a serious business, made all the more difficult when tenses, grammar and word boundaries bear little relationship with modern English. The acknowledgment of these difficulties must precede, and qualify, any attempt at a translation (which Professor Alter does). Correspondingly, the absence of such an acknowledgment must signal a fraudulent or lazy approach. So much for the efforts of Joseph Smith, who’s method for “translating” the Book of Mormon comprised burying his head in his hat, reading out each word that appeared on his scrying stone and not proceeding to the next word until his scribe (a role fulfilled by Martin Harris, Oliver Cowdery and Emma Smith) had written down each word correctly (a discussion on the extant accounts can be found here). Luckily for Joseph Smith, the 2,000 year old “reformed Egyptian” (a language that no-one else has ever heard or seen) that he was supposedly translating shared its grammar, word boundaries and tense system with modern English. And, if he were “translating” (in the commonly understood sense of the word) what was written on the plates, one would expect that he would have been assisted in his task by actually looking at them. More likely, he simply invented it.

The second is that, as in all Hebrew names, the name is not a mere label – it tells us something about the person. Professor Alter points out two alternatives, but I see a theological attraction in harmonizing them. The traditional rendering, “I-Will-Be-Who-I-Will-Be” speaks of Gods unlimited and unconditional being, as the Professor notes. The alternative offers an intriguing possibility in that God has a name that no one has given to him. This avenue is worth exploring further because the biblical convention is that the greater gives names to the lesser. In Genesis 2:19-20, Adam’s first job is to give all the animals names, and in Genesis 2:23, Adam names Eve. To the biblical mind, the giving of the name affirms the hierarchy; the animals are named by Adam, and Adam is named by God. In this schema, one can readily see that the “highest” name is of God himself – he has the “name above all names” (Philippians 2:9) and there is no name “higher” than His. All else in the universe is derived from God and he is the source from which all things are created and have their being (Colossians 1:16 etc). Thus, the two alternatives might be harmonized (whether this was the author’s intent or not) for it offers a picture of One who does not owe his existence to anyone or anything greater than Himself, but is unique in that all else owes its existence to Him.

God is not merely an inhabitant of our universe; He is the unique source of its being. Furthermore, this idea has been around a long time; at least since God spoke to Moses on the Mountain.